To dos

Introduction

Stalling of life expectancy improvements occurred in the UK from 2010 onwards. It was also seen in some other Western European countries. While the reason and severity of this is debated, some also contend the stalling of improvements seen is artefact following an unusual decade of improvement in 2000s (e.g. Murphy 2021).

This notebook will compare annual changes in life expectancy at both birth (\(e_0\)) and at age 65 (\(e_{65}\)) from 1980 to 2019 (or the latest available year) in England and Wales, Scotland, France, Italy, Spains and Germany. Germany includes a ‘Synthetic Germany’ created from a weighted average of East and West German data for common years. The method for creating this ‘Synthetic Germany’ is covered in the methods section in brief and in Appendix X for more detail. In order to explore the hypothesis that the recent stalling in life expectancy, most marked in England and Wales, was an expected ‘correction’ after a decade of unusually fast life expectancy improvements, we have selected the years from 1980 onwards.

Methods

Data

Data were extracted from the Human Mortality Database via the R package HMDHFDplus.

The following countries are included in the comparison:

  • England & Wales (GBRTENW)
  • Scotland (GBR_SCO)
  • UK as a whole (GBR_UK) #we haven’t included UK but can do
  • France (FRANTP)
  • Spain (ESP)
  • Italy (ITA)
  • Germany
    • Total Germany (DEUTNP)
    • East Germany (DEUTE)
    • West Germany (DEUTW)
    • Simulated/Synthetic Germany

Analysis

For each of these countries, and for males and females separately, we are interested in the annual changes in life expectancy at birth (\(e_0\)) and life expectancy at age 65 (\(e_{65}\)), from 1980 to the last available year for each country. In addition, we compare average life expectancy improvements over the 4 decades: 1980, 1990, 2000, and 2010.

We then compared whether the average between the decades was significant, using a regression model.

Synthetic Germany

  • To maybe be moved to the appendix later

To allow UK national trends to be compared with a single German population, we attempted to produce a ‘Synthetic German’ population with data for East and West Germany for years prior to reunification. We estimated that this ‘Synthetic Germany’ could be produced by using a weighted average of 20% East Germany, and 80% West German life expectancy trends. More precise estimates can be produced, and the methods used to reach this conclusion are detailed in Appendix X.

## # A tibble: 3,820 × 5
##    code    year     x sex       ex
##    <chr>  <int> <int> <chr>  <dbl>
##  1 DEUTNP  1990     0 female  78.4
##  2 DEUTNP  1990    65 female  17.6
##  3 DEUTNP  1991     0 female  78.7
##  4 DEUTNP  1991    65 female  17.8
##  5 DEUTNP  1992     0 female  79.1
##  6 DEUTNP  1992    65 female  18.1
##  7 DEUTNP  1993     0 female  79.2
##  8 DEUTNP  1993    65 female  18.1
##  9 DEUTNP  1994     0 female  79.5
## 10 DEUTNP  1994    65 female  18.4
## # … with 3,810 more rows

Results

Descriptive Results

Change in life expectancy in these nations

Next, we compare the annual change in life expectancy at birth and at aged 65 years for the nations from 1980 to the latest available year, by sex.

## # A tibble: 3,972 × 6
##    code    year     x sex       ex delta_ex
##    <chr>  <int> <dbl> <chr>  <dbl>    <dbl>
##  1 FRATNP  1816     0 female  41.1  NA     
##  2 FRATNP  1816    65 female  10.8  NA     
##  3 FRATNP  1816     0 male    39.1  NA     
##  4 FRATNP  1816    65 male    10.7  NA     
##  5 FRATNP  1817     0 female  40.2  -0.890 
##  6 FRATNP  1817    65 female  11.0   0.210 
##  7 FRATNP  1817     0 male    38.2  -0.830 
##  8 FRATNP  1817    65 male    10.6  -0.140 
##  9 FRATNP  1818     0 female  39.1  -1.13  
## 10 FRATNP  1818    65 female  11.1   0.0300
## # … with 3,962 more rows

Changes in life expectancy at birth

  • make smoother lines coloured by sex
  • use consistent colours for all graphs showing separate sex results

Changes in life expectancy at age 65

  • Use slightly stronger (and consistent) colours for sex smoother lines

Discussion

Appendix A: Construction of Synthetic Germany

Bibliography